Key ideas: Published in 1952. Back to: One Is a Crowd: Reflections of an Individualist - by Frank Chodorov
This is a defense of our universities. As they open their doors for another year of business they labor under a wide-spread suspicion of teaching commu- nism. The suspicion is unsupported by fact; it is pure witchcraft. There is reason to believe that some in the faculties advocate communism, but none teach it. The distinction is important.
To illustrate the point, in the field of religion there are many who are intellectually incapable of comprehending Christianity, and therefore of teaching it, but who are quite adept at advocating (preaching) it.
So with communism; it is a pattern of ideas following from basic assumptions, and unless one has made a critical examination of these assumptions one is incapable of evaluating the superimposed ideas.
Our colleges are debarred from examining the basic assumptions of communism, because, as I will attempt to show, these basic assumptions are part and parcel of what is called capitalism, the going order, and it would hardly do to bring this fact to light.
It is an axiom of communism that wages are a fraction of production given to the workers by those who own the means of production. Boiled down to its essence, this idea can be expressed in three words: capital pays wages.
But, is that so in fact? If we define capital as the tools of production, this conception of wages becomes silly, for an inanimate object is incapable of paying anything.
If, as the communists do, we include in the definition the owners of capital, we are faced with another reductio ad absurdum: competition between these machine-owners for the services of machine users automatically fixes the level of wages; capitalists are without the means of affecting the ups and downs of that level.
The capitalist, of course, speaks of the wages he “pays.” But, he is quick to point out that the wages do not come out of his capital, but are derived from the sale of his products; if the market does not absorb the output of his plant he ceases to be a “payer” of wages. This means that the envelopes he hands out to his employees are filled by the consumers, and these are, in large part, the workers themselves.
Thus, the employer of labor is labor, and the wage-earner is the wage-payer. It follows that the general level of wages is determined by the general level of production—leaving out, for the moment, any purloining—and neither capital nor capitalist have any part in fixing it.
It follows also that political power can in no way affect an increase in wages; nor can capital by itself do so. Wages can go up only as a result of increased production, due to an increase in population or improvement in the skill and industry of the current population. That elemental fact will be admitted even by professors of economics, and it is possible that some legislators will recognize it.
Yet, if you dig into some standard economics textbooks or examine the labor- legislation of our land you will find ideas that stem from the communist notion that capital pays wages and that the hard-hearted capitalist keeps them low. A minimum-wage law, for instance, is based on that notion; the law assumes that cupidity is at the bottom of the marginal worker’s low income; the capitalists must be compelled to disgorge. All of which is silly, for the legally enforced increase is simply passed on to the consumer, unless it can be absorbed by increased production due to technological improvement
This brings us to the communist indictment of private capital. The inherent power of capital to fix the level of wages will be used by its owners to defraud the laborers. They will see to it that the laborers receive just enough to keep them alive and on the job, retaining all above that level for themselves.
Here communism introduces the doctrine of natural rights, although it denies that doctrine vehemently later on; it says that the laborers have an absolute right in all that is produced by virtue of the energy put into production; energy is a private possession.
If this is so, then what the capitalist keeps for himself amounts to robbery. The word generally used is “exploitation.” This iniquitous arrangement brings on a host of evil social consequences and should, therefore, be stopped. How? By outlawing private capital. Everything that is produced should belong to the community as a whole (which, by the way, is a flat denial of the original right of the laborer to his product), and the State, acting for the community, must be made sole owner and operator of all capital. The State, particularly when manned by communists, will have no interest in exploitation and will pay wages in full
Our professor of communism could, and should, emphasize this point by an analysis of taxation, particularly the direct kind. Income taxes unequivocally deny the principle of private property.
Inherent in these levies is the postulate that the State has a prior lien on all the production of its subjects; what it does not take is merely a concession, not a right, and it reserves for itself the prerogative of altering the rates and the exemptions according to its requirements. It is a matter of fiat, not contract.
If that is not communist principle, what is? The professor would have to point that out. And he should, in all conscience, show that the considerable amount of capital now owned and operated by the “capitalistic” State was siphoned out of pockets of producers by means of taxation.
But, right here the professor would find himself in a mess of trouble. On the other side of the hall the professor of taxation and the professor of political science would be telling their students that the right of property is conditional, not absolute, that the owner is in fact a trustee answerable to society as a whole. They would deny that this is a concession to communist principle, but it is.
The professor of philosophy would pitch in with an outright rejection of the theory of natural rights, asserting that what we call rights are but priv- ileges granted to his subjects by the sovereign.
The board of trustees would also take notice; the university and its supporters hold a lot of government bonds which are dependent on the power of taxation, and it would hardly do to question the propriety of this power.
And, if the professor presumed to point out that communism is quite consistent in advocating taxation as a means of destroying private capital, he would have the whole house of respectability on his head.
Reverting to the concept of natural rights—basic in capitalistic thought—we find that its tap-root is the will to live.
Out of this primordial desire for existence comes the idea that no man may lay claim to another man’s life. How does that line up with military conscription?
It doesn’t, and the only way you can logically support conscription is to invoke the communist principle that the right to life is conditioned by the needs of the State